Most Lavish of Gifts
by Rebecca Hb
Summary: G1: Scavenger understands the secret of a good gift.


**Most Lavish of Gifts**

Special thanks to Lunatron for encouragement, beta-reading, and coming up with the summary of this fic.

* * *

Hook welded the last strut of Thundercracker's canopy frame in place, then stepped away from the jet to clean his tools. Only Thundercracker's scarred paint provided any reminder of his disastrous encounter with Sunstreaker, and that certainly didn't require Hook's skill to repair. Presumably, Skywarp could handle something as simple as that. The dark jet was certainly able to hover at Hook's elbow like a new-widowed rookie over his remaining sibling.

"You done, Hook?" Thundercracker asked carefully, metal rustling as he sat up. "Only you didn't finish with my paint- And you're going to hit me now, aren't you?"

Hook gave Thundercracker a measured glance. "You seem to have confused me with Bonecrusher." A pause as he wiped off a pair of pliers. "In answer to your question, I am quite finished. Observe that I am cleaning my tools rather than continuing to work on you. As to your paint, unless your wingmate is particularly inept-" Here, he flicked a glance at Skywarp. The Constructicon wouldn't put it past him to alter Thundercracker's paint in new and unusual ways, but on the whole, he could be trusted with something this simple. "-He should be thoroughly capable of handling it himself."

Skywarp made a face at his back, evidently still not noticing how well-polished and mirror-like this section of the wall was. "What the big, mean medic is saying, 'Cracker, is that you're wasting his time by still being here. C'mon, I'm sure you don't want _him_ painting you..."

Thundercracker chuckled and levered himself off the table. "Last time I let you paint me, I wound up in dazzle camouflage."

"You didn't complain, though!"

"It was worth it for the look on Reflector's faces." The two jets left Medical, chattering as they went.

A faint feeling of emptiness, like a pinhole gravitational singularity had just opened, filled his abdomen. He ignored it. It was an odd phantom pain that he'd learned over the millenia to associate with loneliness. At least it didn't make his internals feel as if they were being constricted this time.

He really didn't understand why this happened. Why should he get lonely? He had the other Constructicons, and even they were more than enough at times. Non-Constructicons were some of the most fundamentally annoying creatures in the universe. He didn't understand them, and they didn't understand him. They did stupid, nonsensical things that any fool should be able to see would get them hurt. Then they had the nerve to be insulted when he pointed out that they could have done it a better way.

They talked about things that had no interest to him, or when it was of interest, he already knew more than the speakers did. When he did try to converse with them, the conversations dried up quickly. His phantom pains hurt even _more_ when he tried and failed to get along with people, so he had taken the simple route of only dealing with his fellow Constructicons if he could help it.

The laser welder wouldn't actually get any cleaner if he continued to spritz it with cleanser, though he would start removing the outer layer of metal with two more spritzes. Hmm...

No. Randomly destroying valuable medical equipment was something Bonecrusher or Mixmaster would do. He let go of the nozzle so it could snap back in place, then went to return the welder to his medical kit.

He raised an optic ridge when he noticed a small metal plate magnetized to the side of his medical kit. After replacing the welder and cleaning up the other tools used to repair Thundercracker, he removed it for examination. Ah, just a little note from Scavenger.

* * *

_Hook,_

_I found some of our old plans, the drafts for the Principal Office, that you and Scrapper thought got destroyed when we wrecked Crystal City. I thought you might want them, but you've been too busy every time I went looking for you. If you do want them, I left them in my junk room, right near the door. You can't miss them._

_- Scavenger_

* * *

Well, well, well. He had just mentioned the other day that he wanted to look over some of the stylistic techniques Scrapper had used back then, and here Scavenger had found him the blueprints for a very typical project. Hmm!

Hook affixed the metal plate to the inside of his kit; he could melt it down for supplies if he wound up doing field repairs sometime in the future. Jury-rigging offended his sensibilities, but he had to admit that he was quite good at it. If only his battlefield patients didn't insist that what he provided out there was 'good enough' and actually reported to Medical promptly on return to the ship like they ought to.

That taken care of, and with his medical kit safely stowed away, the surgeon headed down the hall to Scavenger's storeroom. Set up just inside the door was an arrangement of pavement slabs spelling out his name. Taped to one of them was an old-fashioned diskette. Scavenger had perhaps understated how much he couldn't miss the plans.

Hook took it and looked it over carefully. He hadn't seen this particular make in five-point-two-five-seven million years. He hadn't seen a working reader for them for even longer. Hmph. Well, if Scavenger had figured out what was on the diskette, he must have a reader somewhere. Otherwise, he was just randomly guessing - Scrapper had **never** labelled his plans back then.

The crane opened a compartment in his lower arm and tucked the diskette away. He couldn't subspace it, as he recalled; subspace scrambled diskette memory. Hopefully Scavenger had also remembered that; it would be oh-so frustrating to find a reader for this and then discover that he'd wasted all of his time doing so.

/Scavenger./

/Hook?/

/Where have you hidden the disk-reader?/

/Erm, it's under the fossil trilobite. The thing that's a little bit smaller than a cassette in robot-mode, and looks like this?/ Scavenger initiated a data-transfer and dropped an image file into Hook's memory-banks.

/Hm. Very well./

After a small amount of searching, Hook found the trilobite Scavenger had mentioned. Of course, the digger hadn't mentioned that the six-foot fossil was behind a stack of stained glass windows, but Scavenger had never been very good at giving directions. It was a fault of most of the Constructicons, really.

The disk-reader proved to be as bulky as he remembered them being with just as poor a screen. Certainly, there was nothing as good as a data-stick for transferring information since it would drop the data right into your memory-banks, but couldn't people have at least _tried_ to develop a better method of displaying on-disk data?

Hook remained crouched amid Scavenger's junk, trilobite fossil leaning against his knee, while he flipped up the viewscreen and turned the disk-reader on. If it was in working order, a command-line prompt would appear...

A cursor appeared in the lower part of the screen. Hook tapped the Diagnostics key and watched the screen fill up with ancient code-phrases. The scan took longer than he expected it to, and he chided himself for not recalling how slow and stupid these machines had been.

"Fsck!" Hook cursed as the diagnostics finished and reported that while the disk-reader looked operable to the untrained optic, it would simply destroy his disk rather than displaying any data. **How** had Scavenger read the disk on **this**?

And the antiquated piece of machinery did not have a single way for him to diagnose **what** was causing the problem and fix it without taking the whole device apart! He might as well build an entirely new one to his own specifications instead of doing that!

Two finger-lengths of line reeled out from his crane-arm. How obvious! He _could_ build a new disk-reader to his own specifications. He knew the format that disks were encoded in, he knew how to build readers with the correct parts, and he knew how to operate a fabricator and coax it into creating the most esoteric parts imaginable. He was an engineer, by Primus, not some over-qualified medical technician!

Hook snatched up the broken disk-reader and made for his lab, the trilobite clattering to the floor behind him.

* * *

Scrapper peered around the doorframe into Hook's lab. His gestaltmate had out a partial designer's rig and was using the fingertip sensors to manipulate the plans projected into the air in front of him. Hovering to the sides of the plans of the device he was working on were various information articles and still other plans of similar devices. As Scrapper watched, Hook spun the device's plans out from under his direct gaze and moved one of the information articles to the fore.

Given that Hook could have done all of this in his head, Scrapper decided he was showing off.

Scrapper mentally filtered out all of the information articles and secondary plans from his vision then took a long look at the designs Hook was working on. It took him a few moments to puzzle out the electronic schematics, but when he figured out what the plans were for, he went to find Scavenger.

"I see you passed the Principal Office plans onto Hook," he said when he found the digger.

"Yeah." Scavenger glanced up from ore samples he was sorting through, the current sample sitting in his shovel while he analyzed it. "Does he like it? He hasn't been too happy lately."

"He hasn't?" Scrapper considered that briefly. Well, Hook had been more aloof than usual, but they'd all been working hard on the latest weapon Megatron had commissioned them to make so the payloader hadn't paid much attention to it. "All right. Maybe he hasn't."

Scavenger nodded. "So I gave him the plans when you were done with them."

"But you didn't tell him there was a working disk-reader in Long Haul's office?"

"Oh, no. I thought he'd be happier this way."

**The End**


End file.
